What's New at The Loft - Episode 28

Hi everyone, Hope you all had a good 4th of July!   As always life at The Loft has been pretty busy.  Lot's of projects, with so little time to do them.

6/8 - "Cupid" - today's card was MOTW "Made on the Way", using some magazine images, and another image for a background.  After I chose a magazine image for a background I then drew a red heart using some Portfolio, water soluble oil pastels, and doodled with a white Uniball "Signo" pen.  I then adhered the cupid to the background with some pop up foam adhesive.


6/9/10 - "Days Like This"  for this card I tried several different things.  First I collaged a background from sever different magazine images, the used a white Adirondack paint dabber to soften the color a bit. I cut a black and white image of this woman from the Tweety Jill "Fashion Ladies" collage pack and adhered her on top of the background.  Next I used some of my Stencil Collection chalks to add some color to the image.  I then laid down a line of Tombow two way glue on the hat and went into my dollhouse stash and pulled out out small crumbled foam like material used for dollhouse landscaping, and covered the line with the foam to add dimension.  Lastly I added a small bubble tag and added some journaling.

6/10/10 - "Butterfly" - How can butterflies not serve as a source for inspiration!!!.  I created the background on this card using Portfolio water soluble oil pastel crayons and used my finger to smudge and blend the color.  I love the tie dye effect it gives here.  Next I took 3 different paper butterflies (sorry can't remember to source for all 3), and glued the largest one to the background layer then stacked the remaining 2 with foam adhesives squares.  I then creased the wings up on the upper 2 butterflies for even more dimension.

6/11/10 - "Oodles of Doodles"  Well I think the name really speaks for itself.  I'm not a very good doodler, but I'm really happy with the way this turned out.  It feels festive to me!   I've made it a point to try my hand at more doodling in my free time, even it's at work while on a call or something just to gain more practice.  I used a few different mediums for this card.  Including Zig markers, a Uniball Signo pen, a red extra fine Pilot pen, and Crayola watercolor pencils. 

6/12/10 - "Marianne" - No matter how hard I tried I could not get this magazine painting's eyes to turn out just right, so I was not happy with the end result.  I started by adhering a magazine image of a woman to the background and then put a thin layer of Gesso on it.  I next used a pencil to sketch in a few changes I wanted to make to the photo before I painted.  I altered the hair and added a necklace.  I then outline parts of the photo with a Martha Stewart charcoal extra fine tip marker.  I then used my Liquitex "Basics" acrylics to paint the image and the background.  After it was dry I added some highlight with a white Uniball "Signo" pen, and colored in the chain of the necklace with a silver marker.



DIGITAL WEEK
For something a little different I decided to try my hand at creating digital cards, and devoted an entire week to it.  I absolutely love doing digital cards.as not only does it add more creative possibilities and are quicker to make, which means I can get to other projects as well but, it also gives me even more opportunity to play in photoshop.  I love Photoshop Elements, and even though I have taken many classes on it and have become somewhat well versed in it, there is still a lot to learn and discover. I also love playing and seeing the possibilities in a new medium, starting with the basic image itself.   

6/13/10 - "A Woman's Work is Never Done" - I found this vintage image of a woman cleaning and immediately thought it would make a great card.  I tweaked the color a bit, and added the text.  I have so many downloaded fonts now that it takes me a while just to pick the one that I feel is just right for the image.

6/14/10 - "City Stroll"  - It's funny how one little card can have so many layers.  Today's card was a typical example.  I started with the original image I found online of the 2 ladies walking with the skyscrapers as a background.  It was a full color photo, but I played with the color settings to try to give the photo a more vintage feel to better fit the 60's style dresses the ladies were wearing.  However when I tweaked the color to make the dresses on the ladies pop, it saturated the color on the skyscrapers too much, so I added a texture layer to the buildings which now made the color look more washed out, giving the dresses the pop that I wanted.  Next I added a texture layer for the text, and added 2 layers of digital frames.

6/15/10 - "Music"  - I found this great black and white image online of this woman by the piano and knew I had to do something with it.  I started by adding some color by adding a purple fill layer and reducing the opacity a bit.  I then boosted the contrast for the entire image.  Next I stamped the sheet music on the image and removed the stamp from the parts I didn't want it to show in using the eraser tool.  The sheet music digital brush stamp was one I created a long time ago for a class I took.  I then added the text from a quote I found online about music.  The black and white image was really great on it's own, but the purple I think really makes it stand out now.

6/16/10 - "Color Me Happy" - for this card I started with this Life magazine photo I found online.  To me it had a very "Breakfast at Tiffany's" look to it, but I felt it needed a little oomph for what I wanted to achieve so I boosted the contrast.  I wanted to give it a very Andy Warhol look so I then used the paint bucket tool and added different colors everywhere, but still leaving some parts black and white.  I then added the text using a typewriter like font.

6/17/10 "Sadness"  I found this image of  woman's face partially wrapped in burqa online and was immediately drawn to the eyes.  They were so captivating yet so subtle in the expression that I was torn on how to manipulate this image and what emotion to convey.  In thinking about what road to take with this one card however got me inspired on the concept of  trying another digital theme week to see what you could do with the same image everyday (More on that later).  There wasn't much I needed to do to the original photo other than to crop a little more and boost the contrast a bit.  I then used additional layers to colorize her eye and her lips. I then used a character preset for the tear drop and a cool angel statue digital brush I had in my digi stash to try to help create the mood.  There was a lot more I know I could have done to create a more realistic feel to convey the emotion, but my original thought was to use this photo again for the one image every day digital theme week, so I left this one which relates the mood in a more obvious way.


You may have noticed that for the digital cards in this post, I am using images that I have found on the Internet and manipulated.  I do not own these images which were found through a random google search and were used solely for an educational purpose to show how images can be manipulated as a way to lend some inspiration to others to be more creative in what you can do with your own photos.  I have also used my own photos for cards, which you will see in future posts from The Loft.

Well that's all I have for now, but tune in next time to see the rest of the cards from Digital week.  Coming soon will  another digital week, previously mentioned which will be called "One is All You Need"  which will be my experiment in the possibilities of digital manipulation using the same photo for an entire week.    Thanks for stopping by and I hope you come back soon.